


don't care how much it storms

by escherzo



Series: by the inscrutable decree of Providence [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: M/M, No Apocalypse, Set in Episodes 159-160 | Scottish Safehouse Period (The Magnus Archives), Unplanned Pregnancy, seriously this is tooth-rottingly soft content, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:55:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26851789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/escherzo/pseuds/escherzo
Summary: There's a faintly wonky, sideways pair of snowmen beside the front door that Jon did weeks ago to distract Martin from panicking one particularly rough morning, and the size difference between the two, the over-exaggerated skinny body and sour face of one and the big smile and bobbled hat of the other, still makes him laugh when he sees it.It's as Jon's stopping to survey the two of them one morning two weeks later, when the exhaustion has settled into background noise and the nausea hasn't, that it hits him. He gazes for a long moment and says out loud, without even meaning to, “I'll need to add another one soon.”He freezes.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Series: by the inscrutable decree of Providence [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1973212
Comments: 32
Kudos: 284





	don't care how much it storms

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Maiden_of_the_Moon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maiden_of_the_Moon/gifts).



> this is just _excessively_ sappy safehouse pregnancy fic I don't know what came over me other than the unrelenting impulse to make soft cabin content (and that soft cabin content is always a bit of a present to myself and in four minutes it's my birthday). jon is trans here but I don't really go into that in any great detail past Martin checking in re: dysphoria about the whole proceedings.
> 
> hope you enjoy, @Maiden_of_the_Moon!
> 
> title from I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm by Dean Martin

It's the chill that wakes Jon, at first. 

He's bundled into bed under four blankets, the old patchwork quilt Martin put together in November composed entirely of loose stitching and nervous energy, and three other soft, old things besides, and the covers are tucked up to his nose to ward off the cold. The safehouse doesn't have central heating. Not an old place like this. There's a fire in the fireplace in the front room, and they did what they could to patch over all the holes and cracks in the walls to keep the heat in, but it never really gets _warm_. 

The house is silent and still, and Martin isn't beside him, but he can hear the faint sounds of a pencil scratching against paper in the front room, and he smiles. Writing, then. It took months for Martin to really get back into the habit of writing properly, not just scribbled-out lines and wadded up notebook pages, but lately, when he can't sleep, he'll get up and leave Jon cozy in bed, warmed by his lingering body heat, and go write cross-legged in front of the fire. 

Jon wraps a blanket around his shoulders as he gets up, draped like a cape, and slips on his socks before padding out of the bedroom and into the front room. The one big window is covered in ice, a thousand intricate little patterned lines catching the faint light of the early morning dawn, and Martin looks up at the window occasionally before turning back to his notebook, writing a line, chewing on the end of his pencil, writing another half a line. He huffs and scratches out two words and then takes the eraser out of his mouth to smudge them out instead, thinking better of it. 

The angle has to be terrible on his back. Jon has told him a thousand times to not hunch like that. 

He doesn't seem to hear Jon approach, and so Jon takes a moment to just watch him, the tense lines of his back and the way the fire lights up his curls and turns the ginger to a bright, lovely gold and the soft, round bulk of him in his three sweaters. The bottom one is one of Jon's, and Martin had blushed a bit when Jon pointed it out yesterday, as though sharing clothes is the most intimate thing they've done, and Jon truly didn't mean to compel him when he asked why he'd borrowed it, but now all he can think is Martin's soft, pleased, _it smells like you_. 

“Couldn't sleep?” Jon asks, settling down beside him and wrapping the blanket around both of their shoulders instead of just his own. Martin blinks out of the writing reverie he's caught in and leans over to press a kiss to Jon's cheek. 

“Nah,” Martin says. _Nightmares_ , he doesn't need to say. They seem to be decreasing in frequency, or maybe Martin's just hiding them better these days, but one or the other of them ends up waking up screaming more often than not, even after all this time. “Did I wake you?”

Jon shakes his head. “Just got cold, I think,” he says. “Do you want to tell me about it?” 

“Got eaten by worms,” Martin says. He looks down at his battered notebook again and thinks for a moment before tucking in a few words above his sentence with a neat little carat. His handwriting is big and rounded, like Martin himself, and Jon always likes looking at it compared to his own messy chickenscratch. He doesn't look over at Jon as he says it. “Old one, but it's always there in some ways.”

“Yeah,” Jon says, and rests his head against Martin's shoulder. It's warm here, soaking up Martin's body heat as they sit in front of the fire like this, pressed side by side. He closes his eyes and relaxes, and it's then that the slight churn of his stomach makes itself known. Coming down with something, he supposes, although until this moment he wasn't sure he still _could_ get sick. He wrinkles his nose. “You should sit up straighter, you know.” 

“Oh, right,” Martin says with a grin and leans forward further, and Jon can't help but smile. “Do you, um. Do you want me to read you a little?” He's still so shy about his poetry, even after all this time. Even as he's grown so confident, so assured, in other ways that Jon is still discovering. 

“Alright,” Jon says, closing his eyes again and listening as the words ebb and flow, carried down the stream by the soft, rounded vowels and cut-off consonants. 

*

He wakes a second time back in bed, the blanket that was wrapped around him tucked in close, and he's not sure _how_ exhausted he must have been to not wake when Martin carried him back to bed. Martin is beside him, propped up against the wall, his legs under the covers. He's moved on from writing to working on patching up one of the ancient curtains they found the other week, used as the wrapping around three wickedly sharp looking knives stashed under the kitchen floor. They're sunshine-yellow with little embroidered bees on them, and the worse for wear because of the knives, and they would have missed both of them entirely if Jon's foot hadn't caught on the floorboard on the way out the front door to get more firewood. All at once, he'd Known what was underneath, so sudden and startling he'd nearly pitched forward onto the floor.

They're nice, though. Martin smiled and made a comment about them not being the sort of thing he'd expected from Daisy, but Jon saw her apartment once, before she abandoned it entirely, and he knows they were well-loved once, before she fell too far to the Hunt and stopped seeing things that weren't the blood. 

He's still tired, and he yawns, shuffling under the blankets closer to Martin to try and pick up some of the shared heat. All of his limbs feel like lead, and the queasiness lingers around the edges; it's faintly unsettling in a way he can't quite place. Still, there is no immediate threat where they are, past Martin pricking himself too hard with a needle and needing to be patched up, and Martin is warm and soft and by his side, so a little illness is nothing to be concerned about. 

“Looks good,” Jon mumbles, half-closing his eyes again and pressing his forehead against Martin's side. 

“Looks like I don't know how to patch things,” Martin corrects, putting down his needle and thread for a moment to slide a hand through Jon's hair and ruffle it. “Feeling okay?”

“Tired,” Jon admits. “Think I might be getting sick.”

“ _Can_ you?” Martin asks, blinking.

“Apparently so,” Jon says. “Not sure what it is, but nothing serious, I think.”

“That's not as reassuring as you think it is,” Martin says, and Jon curls up closer to Martin and gives into impulse, rubbing his head against Martin's side like an overgrown cat. 

“I know, I know,” Jon says. “I do think it's alright, though. Just need to rest.”

“You'll tell me if you Know what's wrong?” 

“Mm,” Jon agrees, half-slipping back into sleep again already. The world outside the blankets is so cold, but Martin is so warm. 

*

The cabin seems smaller in winter. They're far enough into the Highlands that snow is a regular thing this time of year, and outside, great blinding tufts of it blanket the world, covering over the rickety fence and the old gravel road into town, and it shakes off the trees in great white gusts as the wind howls through. Even in daytime, the world is silent and still, and if they didn't know that the town was there, it would seem like the world had emptied itself entirely, a whole universe just for the two of them.

There are chores to be done and food to make for Martin, but sometimes, they go out walking in the fields instead, hand in mittened hand, enjoying the crunch of their footsteps. There's a faintly wonky, sideways pair of snowmen beside the front door that Jon did weeks ago to distract Martin from panicking one particularly rough morning, and the size difference between the two, the over-exaggerated skinny body and sour face of one and the big smile and bobbled hat of the other, still makes him laugh when he sees it. 

It's as Jon's stopping to survey the two of them one morning two weeks later, when the exhaustion has settled into background noise and the nausea hasn't, that it hits him. He gazes for a long moment and says out loud, without even meaning to, “I'll need to add another one soon.” 

He freezes. 

“I...” he says, staring at the two snowmen, with room for a third if-- _if_ \--

He calls for Martin. 

*

Martin opens the door and comes out to the yard in a rush, towel still over his shoulder from the dishes he was working on, and there is real fear in his face. “Jon?” he asks, hesitant. Jon is still standing there, frozen, and he thought the panic in his voice was hidden, but.

“I, I know what's wrong with me,” Jon says, all in a rush because otherwise he's not going to be able to get this out. There's a faint knot of fear in his own chest, small but spreading, turning his veins to ice more than the chill of the day around them ever could. They haven't talked about this; he'd just assumed it was impossible. He doesn't breathe, doesn't always have a heartbeat, eats regular food largely because Martin goes all blush-warm and pleased when Jon compliments his cooking. “I was looking at the snowmen, and, I.” He closes his eyes to block out the way Martin's face is going from worry to panic, his breaths going shallow. “I said, _I'll need to add another one_.” 

“... You'll need to add another snowman?” Martin asks, baffled. “Jon, what does that have... oh. _Oh._ ” He sucks in a sharp breath. “You're not-- _are_ you? _Can_ you?” 

“Apparently so,” Jon says, laughing without humor. His heart is in his throat, and he's barely able to force the words out. 

What he's not expecting is Martin's arms wrapped around him, hard enough to hurt, and he makes a startled noise, going still in Martin's embrace. After a long moment, he lets himself open his eyes. Martin's own are squeezed tightly shut, and there are tears at the corners, but he's smiling, just a little, so faint Jon nearly misses it. 

“I thought—you were being all, you know, vague and ominous about what was wrong with you, and I thought you might be _dying_. Christ. You've been scaring the life out of me.” Martin takes a shuddering breath and holds Jon tighter, one hand petting through Jon's hair. “Is it—are you okay with it?” Compulsion winds its way around the words, so faint it's almost certainly not on purpose, just a stress reaction, and Jon is so grateful in the moment that he'll have to know what his own honest answer is, because without it, he's not sure he has one yet.

“Yes,” Jon says, wrapping his arms around Martin in return and holding him so close it aches. “It's _yours_ , of course I am.” It's as simple as that. It's Martin's, and so it's worth it, no matter what it might bring. 

“We should go inside,” Martin says, voice still shuddery. “It's freezing out here. Let me get you warmed up.” 

Jon allows himself to be herded indoors and to the couch, and Martin busies himself in the kitchen making tea for the both of them—black tea for himself, decaffeinated black for Jon, out of the stash they keep for late-night tea when they're having trouble sleeping—and looking over his shoulder at Jon like he's afraid that if he stops looking Jon will disappear. Once the kettle is on to boil, he comes over to the couch and starts wrapping Jon up in one of the discarded blankets, tucking him in despite his protests, and finally Jon just lets himself be coddled. He's sure he looks like a scraggly mess, small and skinny and half-hidden under a pile of blankets, only his head and his hands visible to grab the tea Martin hands to him. 

“Do you want something to eat?” Martin asks, looking back towards the kitchen. “I can—I think we got soup the last time we were at the store? You should eat something.”

“ _Martin_ ,” Jon says, so hopelessly fond at the fussing, and when he pulls Martin down into a kiss the tea sloshes a little, but doesn't spill. Martin is pink-cheeked when he pulls back, and he looks between Jon and the kitchen twice, wringing his hands, before sighing and sitting down on the couch next to Jon. He rests his head against Jon's shoulder, even though he has to lean down a ways to do it and has to be getting a crick in his neck for his trouble, but the contact is a comfort right now. 

“Are you feeling okay?” Martin asks finally, after they've both properly settled in and had a bit of tea. “I know you've been—nauseous. Thought that might have been my cooking, to be honest! But I'm.” He breaks off and looks down at his lap, cheeks going pink. “I'm really glad. Is that okay?” 

Jon smiles, a faint, soft thing. “Of course.” Martin is trying to hide his smile, but it's radiating out of him, a joy bubbling up to the surface that can't be contained. 

There's a lot to think about. A lot to _plan_ , oh Christ, this is not a house that's set up for what they have coming next. But for now, he closes his eyes and rests against Martin, and when Martin's hand slips under the blankets to gently cup his stomach, he rests his hand on top, intertwining their fingers. 

*

It's late. Past midnight, at least, and the sun has long-since disappeared, and Jon stares up at the ceiling in the bedroom, blankets pulled up to his chin as his eyes trace the spiderweb cracks in the plaster and the hills and valleys of the old spackle. Every time he closes his eyes, the little knot of fear in his chest tightens and radiates out to the rest of him, and he fights against the urge to sit upright and gasp in air he doesn't need. The house creaks faintly, just loud enough to be audible above the howling of the wind and snow outside, and he's so lost in hearing everything around them, _seeing_ everything, that he almost misses it when the sheets rustle beside him. 

“Jon?” Martin whispers. “Are you still awake?”

“Can't sleep,” Jon admits after a moment. 

“You alright?” Martin leans over and presses a kiss to his cheek, and Jon smiles a little. 

“Hard to stop thinking,” Jon says, still looking up at the ceiling instead of at Martin. It's easier that way. 

“I know--” Martin sighs, tucking an arm around Jon's middle and drawing him closer. “I know what you said earlier, but like. If it's too much—I know you've said you don't really get, you know, that kind of dysphoria usually, but. If you can't because of that, or if you just don't want it, I'll understand.” 

“It's not that,” Jon says, closing his eyes. “I'm just scared.”

Martin strokes a hand up and down Jon's side, slow and rhythmic, his fingers catching on the fabric of Jon's sleep shirt and then smoothing it back down again. He's quiet. 

“What if it's not human?” he asks finally. _I'm not human. Am I still human enough to do this?_

“Then we figure it out,” Martin says, determined, and then hesitates. “Is it. I don't really know how this stuff works, honestly. Um. _Could_ it just not be human? Is that a thing?” 

“To be honest, I have no idea,” Jon says. “But it's _me_ having it.” 

“Even if has eighteen eyeballs and can read our thoughts, it'll still be our--” Martin swallows, and his voice is much quieter when it comes out again. “It'll still be our baby.” 

They're both quiet for a long moment. Jon hasn't felt brave enough to say those words out loud yet, and Martin, too, seems startled by saying them. The house sways and creaks, rocking back and forth in the wind, and Jon is grateful for the darkness that hides the way he mouths the words to himself. Feeling them out. 

“If it helps,” Martin says into the silence. “I'm scared too. Not about that, but.” He hesitates, and Jon reaches over and squeezes his hand. “My mum hated my dad.”

“And hated you because of him,” Jon finishes, closing his eyes again. He squeezes Martin's hand a little tighter. 

“Yeah,” Martin says. “I don't—Christ, Jon, I don't know how to be a dad.” 

“I don't know either. I cared about my grandmother, but I don't think she was exactly the model of ideal parenting.” 

“Yeah.” Martin sighs and settles in more heavily against the pillows, hand still entwined with Jon's. 

“Do _you_ still want to do this?” Jon asks. “If you don't—if you can't.” He swallows. “It goes for you too. If you can't, it's alright.” 

“No,” Martin says. “I do. And we'll figure it out. Maybe it'll have two parents who don't know how to be dads and eighteen eyeballs and probably an aunt who's an, an eldritch horror monster made of doors, or something, but we'll figure it out.”

“You want Helen to be its _aunt_?” Jon asks, flabbergasted. 

“Not really, but she'll be around, I'm sure,” Martin says, breaking off into a yawn mid-sentence. “Let's worry about that when we get there, okay?” 

“Alright,” Jon says. “Alright.” 

They curl in close to each other, Martin's arm tucked around Jon's middle, a careful hand cupped over his belly and the promise of life within, and Jon drifts off to sleep with the warmth of Martin all around him. All around _them_. Maybe it will have eighteen eyeballs, or six, or none. Maybe it will have Martin's curls, or Jon's nose, or a mouth full of fangs. Maybe it will know their thoughts, or have limbs that don't work like human limbs do, or maybe it'll be completely normal and just an unholy terror of a child like Jon was when he was young, and they'll chase it all over the Highlands. 

It'll be loved, regardless. That, he already knows.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * A [Restricted Work] by [Maiden_of_the_Moon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maiden_of_the_Moon/pseuds/Maiden_of_the_Moon) Log in to view. 




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